China and Myanmar
Michael Kenna: back to Artist
Artist Statement
Kenna’s photographic work focuses on landscape. He is considered a master in the art of contemporary photography. His approach to everyday scenery is enigmatic, leaving the viewer seduced. The mysterious aura of his photographs is created by long exposures that allow time and movement to be a part of the landscape, something the human eye so easily ignores in a glance.
Most of Michael Kenna’s photography is taken at dawn or at night, and he has commented that “you can’t always see what’s otherwise noticeable during the day … with long exposures you can photograph what the human eye is incapable of seeing.”
Since about 1986 he has mainly used Hasselblad medium format and Holga cameras and this accounts for the square format of most of his photographs. The main exception was for the photographs in Monique’s Kindergarten for which a 4×5 large format camera was employed. His photography is sepia toned silver gelatin. A gelatin silver print is composed of four layers: paper base, baryta, gelatin binder, and a protective gelatin layer or overcoat. The multi-layer structure of the gelatin silver print and the sensitivity of the silver imaging salts require specialized coating equipment and fastidious technique to produce a consistency that is free of impurities harmful to the image.
Kenna first visited Japan in 1987 for a one-person exhibition and was utterly seduced by the country’s terrain. Over the years he has traveled throughout almost the entire country, constantly taking photographs. From these many treks, the book Japan, featuring 95 of these photographs, was conceived. The simplicity and clarity of Kenna’s Japan alludes to, rather than describes, his subject, allowing the viewer to have a completely unique and tailored interpretation. He has described this body of work as, “more like a haiku rather than a prose.”
Artist Biography
British Photographer Michael Kenna’s (1953 – Present) mysterious photographs, often made at dawn or in the dark hours of night, concentrate primarily on the interaction between the natural landscape and human-made structures. Kenna is both a diurnal and nocturnal photographer, fascinated by light when it is most pliant. With long time-exposures, which might last throughout the night, his photographs often record details that the human eye is not able to perceive.
Kenna is particularly well-known for the intimate scale of his photography and his meticulous personal printing style. He works in the traditional, non-digital, silver photographic medium. His exquisitely hand crafted black and white prints, which he makes in his own darkroom, reflect a sense of refinement, respect for history, and thorough originality.
During Kenna’s fifty year career, his photographic prints have been shown in almost five hundred one-person exhibitions and over four hundred group exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout the world. They are also included in well over a hundred permanent institutional collections. Ninety monographs and exhibition catalogs have so far been published on Kenna’s work.
In 2022, Kenna was awarded the decoration of Officier des Art et des Lettres at Paris Photo by Rima Abdul Malak, the Minister of Culture in France. With this award, Kenna’s life archive is now being housed by the French State at the Mediatheque de Photographie et Patrimoine (MPP) at Fort Saint-Cyr in Montigny-le Bretonneux (Yvelines). The donation included 3,683 original silver gelatin photographic prints of images made in 43 different countries, along with their accompanying negatives and scans, 175,000 other negatives accompanied by their corresponding contact sheets, 6,422 working prints from the years 1983-2000, 1,280 Polaroid prints, 87 books and monographs printed on his work, and all the archives relating to his artistic activity for the past 50 years.
Pricing
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1070 Homer Street,
Vancouver, BC, V6B 2W9, Canada
T. 604.737.3969
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